Those Chickens Are Spying On Me...

We moved up to the country and I felt compelled to get some “farm animals.” Chickens seemed the easiest, so I ordered 25 chicks from a catalogue and they arrived in the mail 2 weeks later. They were an assortment of layers, and guaranteed to be 90% hens. We already had three roosters from a farmer that Max worked with. The fact that someone would give us roosters should have been my first clue. However, I was so gung ho, and totally clueless.
As soon as the chicks were old enough, we planned to let the chickens be free-range birds. They would help eat the wood ticks that were plaguing us. It was great fun owning chickens; I loved watching them strut across the yard. We had some fancy fluffy brown hens that had huge puffy pantaloons of feather and scrawny legs. Watching them truck across the yard always made me laugh, and those fresh eggs…Nothing is a good as fresh eggs. We were getting two dozen eggs a week, the perfect number for our family. Some of the eggs were so large, you’d have thought we had Condors laying for us. How this little hen could lay an egg almost as big as herself, was, and still is, a mystery to me. You’d think that laying something as big as that would hurt. Maybe they weren’t clucking, but repeating the mantra of: “breath, just relax…” Poor little hens.
The chickens were funny too. We have a front and back deck that run along the length of the house. The roosters loved to crow right into the open windows. They would jump up onto the deck railing and walk until they were by the window then turn and crow right into the house. It’s a myth that roosters only crow at sunrise, they really crow all day. I didn’t mind, I still love the sound of a rooster crowing. The hens developed the creepy habit of looking into the windows and spying on us. It was un-nerving to open the curtain in the morning and be face to face with a chicken. What they were looking at became a running joke. They watched me cook chicken for dinner, and scramble eggs for breakfast. They loved to watch us, watch TV.
As the chickens grew, it became obvious that we had a problem– too many roosters. They fought over the hens, tried to mount each other and never left the poor hens alone. They were really pests. As much as we liked the fresh eggs and hearing the roosters crow, we noticed a couple of other problem too…we had chicken poop everywhere. On the deck railings, on the deck chairs, everywhere in the yard, and even on the kids slide. Those stinky birds went poo everywhere. We also no longer had peepers. Peepers are small fogs that sing at night. I loved to fall asleep to the sounds of the frogs; I guess the chickens found them tasty.
Another problem was the dumb birds didn’t all return to the hen house at night. After losing three hens, we started to round them up nightly. Each and every night we would round up the stragglers that didn’t make it back to the hen house. You would be surprised to know that chickens can run very fast when chased. And boy did we ever have to chase them. We must have looked like fools, I’m just glad we don’t have any close neighbors. We had a big old black Great Dane dog at the time, and even he would get up and come to watch the show.